camera tracking / rolling shutter / best HD camera ?

[jacksc02]

I am loving my 5d MK2.
Rolling shutter isnt much of an issue (in my view) for most shots and if any shots have major rolling shutter artefacts then there is a good plugin for nuke/AE by the foundry that sorts it out.
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/rollingshutter/

[instinct]

It does a great job, as opposed to the rollingshutter plugin from The Foundry. With 1080p, you will probably lose about 30-100px resolution, depending on the speed of motion, but it hardly makes a different in sharpness for the end result.

Mind sharing what it does better than the foundry one as i got pretty decent results out of it ? Also loosing 30-100px resolution sounds rather harsh and if it moves optical center will kill all matching, no ?

Regards,
Thorsten

[plastic_]

Mind sharing what it does better than the foundry one as i got pretty decent results out of it ? Also loosing 30-100px resolution sounds rather harsh and if it moves optical center will kill all matching, no ?

Regards,
Thorsten

Not sure about the pixels, maybe I'm off. It depends on the threshold.
Anyway, when I tried the Foundry plugin I was very disappointed with its performance, there were artifacts at the edges, similar to the Twixtor smears (when it fails building motion vectors), and it just wasn't really fixing anything.
I gave up on the idea to fix rolling shutter then, because the output was worse than the "unfixed" footage, and most people don't notice it anyway.
Later I saw someone using the proDad Mercalli plugin and it did everything I hoped for, without apparent side effects.
It works out of the box, with a simple interface. It also does a great job with camera shake. Depending on the amount of correction, resolution is lost of course.
I'm not sure if there is a demo, because I purchased it right away, but I definitely recommend checking it out, even if the company and website looks strange, I never heard of them before, but the plugin is really cool.

[instinct]

RollingShutter did as said a pretty decent job for me...just took a look at mercalli and seems rather no-go for us. No nuke plugin, no commandline version, no sequence support in the standalone :/

[tammo]

If your camera supports 60 or 50 Frames per second, shooting at those higher FPS rates
and dropping every second frame for final output reduces rolling shutter by forcing the sensor to work faster.
You loose motionblur but you can get that back for instance by using timewarp effect in after effects,
set to manual shutter override and 100% speed.

[stevesideas]

All good advice but what if I do want to do faster movements and pans with a camera ?

[joconnell]

Then you're screwed. Fast is a relative term though, if you're doing a "whip pan" where you cover a huge arc in a fraction of a section you'll run into trouble with any footage regardless of what it was shot on but again since it's so blurry you don't need to be as accurate. Again something like rolling shutter can really help out on it. The Canon XH A1 might be a decent option for more handheld stuff - a ccd instead of a cmos chip but less options in terms of frame rates.

[3DMK]

All I know is that the HD Footage from ANY Video Camera under $10,000 is not even comparable to a $1200 DSLR....regardless of rolling shutter issues.
The film-like quality of DSLR's just puts most video-cameras to shame....for a fraction of the cost.

[stevesideas]

Maybe I should get a steadicam merlin and use my 5d mk2 to record then apply the noise in post. Probably limiting my movement still but probably a good thing to test on first.

[mopy]

just my two cent : did you check out http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/rollingshutter/ used it on a litle test with a 5d and 50mm 1,4 http://vimeo.com/16052000

[joconnell]

Yep no problems there, it's only with really quick camera moves you'll get issues, and again the 5d is the worst camera in terms of shutter wobble. Canon are due to release a new version of their image processor (the digic chip) which should provide a more stable image again (hopefully without line skipping too) and it'll likely appear in something like a 5d mkIII since it's the oldest of the video dslr cameras!

[Neilg]

Quite enjoyed this thread - i'm looking to buy a camera which can do video late this summer so it's been a nice lowdown.

[joconnell]

If you're going cheapy then the 600d is a bargain. The 550d is better again but I reckon the fold out turnable screen is quite handy for low shots. The gh2 has the best image quality in terms of codec and also it actually scales the image down to make its frames rather than throwing away lines of the image - you get way less artifacting with footage that has lots of horizontal lines and also the sensor is quite fast in terms of getting less rolling shutter issues. The 5d is the nicest image photographically due to its larger sensor and it's damn good in low light, but from a post point of view it's pretty bad in terms of rolling shutter. Might be fine if you're careful with your camera movements though and it's the priciest. I'm not counting the 1d since it's not a full frame and it's not more stable / better than a 60d / 7d so you'd be mad to spend the extra cash again for video!

[plastic_]

If you're going cheapy then the 600d is a bargain. The 550d is better again but I reckon the fold out turnable screen is quite handy for low shots. The gh2 has the best image quality in terms of codec and also it actually scales the image down to make its frames rather than throwing away lines of the image - you get way less artifacting with footage that has lots of horizontal lines and also the sensor is quite fast in terms of getting less rolling shutter issues. The 5d is the nicest image photographically due to its larger sensor and it's damn good in low light, but from a post point of view it's pretty bad in terms of rolling shutter. Might be fine if you're careful with your camera movements though and it's the priciest. I'm not counting the 1d since it's not a full frame and it's not more stable / better than a 60d / 7d so you'd be mad to spend the extra cash again for video!

Are you sure that the GH-2 is better with rolling shutter than the 5dII?
I remember seeing a comparison and it was about the same.
It is clearly better with moire/aliasing though. I hope Canon fixes that with the 5dIII.

[pg1]

This could be a useful add-on http://www.atomos.com/ for dslr workflow, outputs to apple prores